The present invention relates to a removable and replaceable construction for the lamp unit of a projector.
Recently, a type of projector has become widespread which irradiates light from a lamp upon a picture display device such as a digital micromirror device (DMD) or a liquid crystal display device or the like, and projects a picture which is displayed upon this picture display device upon a screen.
Since, with a projector, sometimes the amount of light which is emitted by the lamp used as a light source may drop, or for one reason or another the lamp may break, accordingly, as described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication 2001-92009 or Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication 2004-264387, structures have been proposed in which it is possible to exchange the lamp unit.
With a prior art projector, in order to make the structure more compact, a structure is often employed in which the lamp unit is stored in a lamp storage unit in a state in which the optical axis of the lamp unit is tilted. However, when this type of structure is adopted, when storing the lamp unit in the lamp storage unit, it is necessary to do so with the lamp unit in a tilted state, and this is an extremely difficult task from the point of view of the user. Furthermore there has been the problem that, when the user is storing the lamp unit in the lamp storage unit, the lamp unit may strike some other component such as the wall surface of the lamp storage unit, so that sometimes it has not been possible to store the lamp unit in the lamp storage unit in a smooth manner.
The object of the present invention is to provide a projector with which, even though a structure is employed in which the lamp unit is stored as being tilted with respect to the projector, still it is possible to store the lamp unit in a smooth manner.